


Turning Puddles Into Oceans

by marauders_groupie



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Supernatural Elements, grounder!clarke
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 07:40:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8881753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marauders_groupie/pseuds/marauders_groupie
Summary: Written for Bellarke Christmas Calendar 2016!
Prompt: Grounder Clarke finding a hurt Bellamy and taking him to her village to heal him. 
*
Clarke yawns before replying, safely ensconced in her blankets. “There is so much knowledge in the world, Bellamy. The other clans didn’t want the books, what little there was left of them, and so we took them in.”
They are good at that, the Delphi, Bellamy learns. They are good at taking unwanted things in. They are good at giving them a home.





	

**Author's Note:**

> The lovely Haley of Bellarke Christmas Calendar asked me to contribute and when I saw this prompt, I had to write it. I hope you guys will like it as much as I liked writing it. 
> 
> The title is from Mating Ritual - Game.
> 
> Enjoy! :)

When Bellamy wakes up, it’s dark. He can’t see anything but the faint flickering of a candle lit somewhere near to where he is lying, and it makes his stomach drop.

The dropship isn’t his home, Ark wasn’t either, but this – this is foreign.

When his eyes get adjusted to the lack of light, he starts noticing things. Things like the charcoal sketches hanging on the walls of the cabin, the smell of wood and leaves, pelts hanging on a chair.

And a woman.

She is lying curled up next to a small hearth, her back to him. With how she’s covered in fur, from her coat to her boots, Bellamy would’ve mistaken her for a bear, but then there is her hair.

It’s golden, the brightest he’s ever seen and for a second he forgets about the searing pain in his thigh, what woke him up, and he forgets that he’s in a strange place with a woman he doesn’t know.

In that moment, everything in his world funnels to her and he watches her back move as she breathes until he manages to knock something from the makeshift nightstand and she stirs.

When she turns around, everything comes back rushing to him. The battle, yelling at Miller to fall back, take Monty and Octavia with him back to the camp, Grounder warriors marching towards them – too many, too many, not enough for the guns to count.

Seven days on the ground, ten people they’ve lost.

Bellamy tried to pretend like it doesn’t hurt but everything comes rushing back with the war paint smattered across the woman’s cheeks, her steps tentative as she approaches him. Atom dying, struck down by the Grounders, Octavia screaming, purple and blue butterflies and the crimson of how he tried to save them all but couldn’t.

“Don’t come any closer,” he warns her when she’s almost close enough to touch. The fur of her coat is reaching up to her chin, making her seem both small and powerful at the same time. The kind of poison that is dangerous enough to be kept in tiny vials.

She blinks at him, once, twice, and then finally nods. “You were injured. I had to – “

“Because _your_ people attacked us!”

She recoils at that, mouth curling up in disgust. There’s purple paint on her cheeks, her hair is golden and all Bellamy can see is red, red, _red_.

“My clan did not attack you, Bellamy Blake,” her voice is very low, very dangerous. “The Delphi Clan do not attack. We _heal_.”

The way she says it – heal – it makes him feel like he’s in the presence of royalty. The only thing missing is a crown on top of her head with the way she holds herself.

“I demand to be taken back to my people,” he replies, feeling a muscle tick in his jaw. The woman nods, shifts further away from him.

“When you are better, of course. You are not a prisoner.”

Bellamy scoffs. “Funny. I feel like one. You didn’t even say how you found me.”

“You want answers?” she asks and he nods. At that, she sits down at the end of the bed, careful not to touch him. His left leg is still sprawled across the covers, fur thrown haphazardly over his body. Strangely enough, he is not cold. “My friends and I were hunting. That place where you decided to build your camp – it is rich with meat. We found you on our way back home and brought you here. My people heal, I told you that already.”

“How do you know my name, then?”

At that, she smirks, and it’s so out of place that it makes Bellamy’s breath catch. There’s a mischievous glint in her eye when she says, “Ah, it’s not only healing we do here.”

Something about all of that – about the pain in his leg and the way she smiles like she’s letting him in on a secret and the fact that he’s been two steps from certain death for the last ten days – it makes Bellamy burst out laughing.

It’s one of those laughs that he feels deep down to his stomach and for a moment there, the woman – no, the girl, because she is young even though there is something dark and ancient in her eyes –eyes him warily.

And then she starts laughing, too, as if only now understanding the full absurdity of the situation.

“I’m Clarke,” she presses out at last, curling her tongue around the letters in a strange and new way. Bellamy shakes her hand, tries to ignore the jolt of electricity passing through his skin. “And when you’re better, I’ll show you my village.”

“I’d like that.” A beat of silence. “What about my people?”

“They will not be harmed.”

And he doesn’t know why, but he trusts her.

For the next few days, he tries to let himself heal. It’s hard because he knows that his friends – his family – are out there. The Trikru might not retaliate in the next few days but it’s still not _safe_.

And it’s hard because he keeps insisting on getting up so much that Clarke sends a fierce-looking woman to make sure that he doesn’t.

“This is Raven, Bellamy. She will take care of you while I’m gone.”

“Raven?” he asks, frowning.

The other woman nods, her hair stringed up in braids. “Because I’m the harbinger of death. Caw, caw, motherfucker.”

Raven quickly becomes his favorite, poking and prodding at his life on the Ark. All of them, it seems, know that something fell out of the sky recently and most of them suspect that it was a legend they’ve only heard about – a town in the sky.

“It’s not really a town,” he explains, to both Clarke and Raven, sitting on the end of the bed and slurping at their soups, eyes wide. “It’s more like a – “ he waves his hand vaguely. “A rollercoaster? But not really.”

“We have rollercoasters.”

“You do?”

Raven nods. “Sure. They just don’t work. I’m trying to get them there.”

The Delphi Clan is comprised of very diverse people. There are the healers, like Clarke and her mother, the village leader. She’s a stern-faced woman with stormy gray eyes but she still makes him feel welcome. Then there are the mechanics, like Raven and Wick, her colleague Bellamy only saw in passing. There are historians, although they, apparently, keep to their libraries.

“Why do you have historians?” Bellamy asks one night. In the last few days, Clarke has taken to making her bedroll right next to the bed and often they drift off to sleep together; either when Clarke talks about her people or when Bellamy talks about his. They learn about each other and it’s fascinating, how there’s always something new to learn with the Delphi. It makes Bellamy’s head burst with all the possibilities.

Clarke yawns before replying, safely ensconced in her blankets. “There is so much knowledge in the world, Bellamy. The other clans didn’t want the books, what little there was left of them, and so we took them in.”

They are good at that, the Delphi, Bellamy learns. They are good at taking unwanted things in. They are good at giving them a _home_.

Four days after he woke up in a strange place, Octavia rides into the village and stomps her way to Clarke’s cabin. Bellamy’s barely woken up, it’s too early – the sky is still blue like a bruise, but he’d know her voice anywhere.

“Where the fuck have _you_ been?”

Clarke shoots up in her own bed next to him and scrambles for the knife she keeps stuck in her boot. “Who are you and how did you get in?”

Octavia gives her a dismissive once over and then points at Bellamy. “I’m this dick’s sister. And he’s been missing for a week.”

“I was wounded, Clarke and her people took me in.”

“You could have let us know somehow.”

A second of silence, in which Bellamy wishes he could get up without anyone’s help and in which Octavia toes the wooden floor with the tip of her boot, both of the siblings yearning to get over their pride and just hold one another.

Finally, in a whirlwind of limbs and hair, she jumps into his arms and buries her face into the crook of his neck. She’s cold and her hair smells like the wind, but Bellamy breathes it in.

“Fuck, I missed you, O.”

Clarke gives them privacy, scrambles off into the cold morning with a fleeting smile. It’s not long before tea is brought over, a concoction that is supposedly good for not catching a cold but fails short at the taste test.

“I keep telling Abby that it’s shit,” Raven grins, wickedly sharp and automatically taking to liking Octavia.

She stays there for the next two days but when Bellamy can finally get up, Clarke shakes her head, says no. “He’s not ready for such a long trip yet, Octavia.”

“Bell can make it.”

“No.”

So she rides back to the camp, anger uncontained whenever she looks at Clarke.

“She’ll be safe, you know,” Clarke tells Bellamy, her lips close to his ear. The sky is grey and he can hear Octavia swearing. “I sent guards.”

“Why are you so sure that no one will attack my people while I’m here?”

Clarke doesn’t reply. All she does is bring him a coat.

And it’s not until he steps out from the cabin and into the village that Bellamy understands why there is an air about Clarke that makes everyone comply. It’s not just her mother, it’s the influence _she_ has on these people.

The Delphi Clan’s settlement is on top of a mountain, rickety cabins that are much sturdier than they look. There is no snow but the wind whips Bellamy’s cheeks while Clarke helps him walk. His left leg is still a problem but she tells him to stop being stupid and just lean on her.

And really, someone so tiny shouldn’t be able to shoulder his weight, but Clarke smiles at him like it’s nothing at all.

The cabins are all purple, the same kind of purple that Clarke paints on her cheeks every morning. Before she can put her war paint on, she is sleepy and hazy, eyelids batting open and smiling at him, slow and soft.

But now, amongst the people who nod at her and regard him with a mixture of fear and curiosity, she is calm, she is powerful.

“Wow,” he utters finally, when a man approaches her to ask for the next hunting trip and leaves off assured that no one will be starving this winter. “You really are a princess.”

Clarke looks up at him, a deep set crease between her brows. Impossibly, Bellamy wants to smooth it out with his thumb. “ _What_?”

“That’s what I thought when I first saw you. That you were some kind of a princess.”

She raises her jaw petulantly and shoots back, “Well, you are an _asshole_.”

“That all the swear words you know?” he teases in return and Clarke rolls her eyes, helps him keep going. The main square is overflowing with people, from those who seem to be defying cold with flowy skirts and loosely braided hair, to those who are wearing furs just like him and Clarke.

It’s enchanting, in a way, the lanterns and the cabins, people and children running around, the steep slope and yet no one worrying that one day they’re all just going to slide down the mountain.

Peace.

That’s what it is, that feeling Bellamy can almost taste in the harsh wind and easy smiles.

It’s peace.

“You don’t fight other clans, do you?”

Clarke shakes her head. They are almost at the library now, walking down an alley, someone’s laughter rising above the rooftops. “We do not, no.”

“How?”

For a second, Bellamy thinks she is going to tell him. All he’s known since he came to Earth was fighting. These people fight for everything they have – there is no peace. There is only death before dishonor.

And then there is the Delphi Clan that seems to flow just like the river running down the mountain. The Delphi Clan, one mountain away from the world. When Bellamy closes his eyes, he can almost hear the stone calling him home.

“We believe in different things. Ours is not the fight, Bellamy,” she explains, quietly, helping him sit down at the steps in front of the old building. She takes a seat next to him, her teeth sinking into her lower lip as she stares off into the distance. “We believe in a world that can be better. And so we live on a mountain and no one has any use for us. When we need food, we hunt, but they do not touch us.”

“That’s impossible.”

Clarke hums in approval, shoots him a crooked smile. “We found a way. We can help your people find it, too.”

And there it is – the question of his people. Clarke sent guards with Octavia, to make sure that she comes home safe, but that doesn’t mean she will stay safe. He’s heard what Abby, Clarke’s mother, told Raven. The whole ground is a warzone.

And so the Delphi live in the mountains.

Bellamy’s people still aren’t safe and his heart skips a beat when Clarke offers, eyes hesitant and careful, as if she’s trying to gauge his reaction.

“There is enough room for your people. You don’t have to fight.”

It’s the first time she’s touched him, apart from when she changes his bandages. And it grounds him, makes him feel safer. She’s barely eighteen, Bellamy knows, heard it in passing, people’s mouths full of “She is so young and so wise” – and he feels that, too. Feels what her people feel.

Like this one girl is enough to save them all.

His heart is beating a war drum and his voice is hoarse when he replies, “I’ll think about it.”

Clarke nods with a smile that doesn’t reach up to her eyes and helps him into the library. When he’s safely sitting in a corner with a pile of books and the opportunity of reading them, of uncovering the history they’ve all missed sitting up there in the space tin can, Clarke lingers in the doorway.

“It would be such a shame for your people to die, Bellamy Blake. You are all worthy of surviving.”

 

*

 

Life is never like this, Bellamy thinks when he’s packing his bags and getting ready to leave. He has tea, meat, armed guards that will escort him back to the dropship. He’s got everything and a promise of Clarke doing her best to broker a peace treaty between the Sky People and the Trikru.

He’s got everything but he wants to stay in the village. Life is never like this, calm and easy, with Raven keeping him company and even helping him walk to the library every morning.

The first time she does that, Bellamy grins and asks, “We’re both crippled. How’re we going to make it, huh?”

And Raven grins back. “Well, shit. We’re either going to succeed or fail spectacularly.”

In the end, they make it.

In the evening, Clarke returns to the cabin, dropping her coat off and rubbing at her sore muscles. She works in the perfunctory clinic at the other end of the village, listens and helps people all day. At the end of it, she is tired and by the time he’s found out that she’s broken her arm when she was five because she thought a squirrel couldn’t get down from a tree, Bellamy says –

“Why do you keep sleeping on the floor when there’s enough room here?”

He thinks she’s going to kill him, curses himself for not just offering to sleep on the floor himself.

But then Clarke just breaks out into a smile and climbs up into the bed next to him, her icy cold feet between his calves, automatically shifting into intimacy and burying her nose into his collarbone.

“Warm,” she mutters at last, her words nearly muffled by his skin.

“Sorry, what did you say, Princess?” he makes her repeat it because he wants to hear it. Because she’s this badass princess that could probably kick his ass but for some reason never does. He’s half in love with her already and it’s so pointless to deny it.

“I said you’re horrible.”

And he chuckles into her hair, that wild mess of frizzy curls, kisses the top of her head. “Yeah, I like you, too.”

So they sleep together and if she thinks it’s odd, she doesn’t mention it. All she says is “Cuddling has health benefits” and makes him snort into his soup at lunch.

Raven gets him to help out in her makeshift lab, makes him explain the plumbing system on the Ark to the best of his abilities. When she’s done interrogating him, she slams the door into his face and Bellamy can’t do anything other than laugh.

And then there are days when it’s worse, when he’s woken up by Clarke shivering in the bed next to him, shaking her head and murmuring something he can’t hear in a language he can’t understand.

There are words and there are names. For some, he knows that she means war. Others, he thinks, mean love.

So he wakes her up, like she wakes him up when he’s having a bad dream, and when she starts crying, Bellamy holds her.

“What hurt you, huh?” he asks, knowing that he’s not going to get the answer. There she is, a princess trapped in her faraway magical castle, and she’s not happy. Not really.

By the time sun rises, they’re both asleep, but their fingers are laced together.

In the morning, they pretend nothing has happened.

People remember his name by the time he is supposed to leave. Those in the library, Marcus and Charles, albeit constantly at war with each other, bring him books he might be interested in every single day.

“We’ll miss you, Bellamy. These new children aren’t interested in history. All they want to do is prophesize.” Marcus says it with a wrinkled nose and if it weren’t for his last word, Bellamy wouldn’t have known.

He wouldn’t have known.

So he makes him explain what he meant by that, understands why exactly Clarke smiles mysteriously when she mentions healing.

Because here is the thing – she doesn’t mention _how_ she heals. How they can be at peace. And once Bellamy finds out, he storms into the small cabin, startles Clarke, makes her tell him.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

She already knows what he is talking about, eyelids closing softly only to open a moment later. Every nerve in Bellamy’s body is on fire, excited and worried and everything, _everything_ , because nothing is simple with these people.

“Come sit with me.”

Her thigh is burning hot touching his. Somewhere along the way she lost the fur, and now she is sitting in front of the fire in a perilously thin shirt that might have been blue once.

“If Marcus told you that it’s magic – it’s not,” she starts, exposing her wrists to the fire. There are sigils of her clan tattooed on her skin, circles with arrows pointing inwards, a target. Bellamy never asked her why they chose that.

“The Delphi, I should have known.”

The oracle of Delphi. His mother read him stories when he was a boy. He even told Clarke about it, what a coincidence it was that her clan would bear the same name, and when she laughed into his shoulder, he’d wondered what was so funny.

Somehow, he’s not even angry. The village turned him into something else, a person that forgot that there is a war raging outside, has been raging ever since he was born.

“It’s not magic, Bellamy, I told you. It’s just healing. It’s just – “ she purses her lips, tries to find the right words – “critical thinking.”

Bellamy laughs and she tries to look offended. “Come on, Clarke. You can bullshit better than that.”

“What would you have me say? Yes, some of us can see the future. Yes, the other clans are afraid of us. It doesn’t mean we are always right. It’s a lucky guess. You could make it and you’d have the same chance of being right as any of us are.”

Her wrists are delicate in his palms when he takes them, makes her look at him. There is so much he doesn’t know about her but God, desire is burning bright in his stomach and Bellamy _wants_. He wants to know her so much he can almost taste the sugar and the saffron she fed him the first time he wouldn’t sleep and woke up in the middle of the night wanting to go home.

“That’s why they are so afraid of you, isn’t it?”

Clarke smiles ruefully, shakes her head. “No. They are so afraid of us because the tribes down there,” she gestures towards the window, towards the cliffs and the forests covering everything, “call me Wanheda. They are afraid of us because I have _slaughtered_ to keep my people safe.”

“You saved your people, that’s all that counts.”

“But I killed someone else’s. The other tribes, they have kill marks. You get one right here,” she traces the skin of his shoulder with her fingertip, soft so he can barely feel it, “for every person you killed. Heda told me that my back wasn’t big enough.”

“You loved her, didn’t you? Lexa?”

Bellamy knows the rumors, knows the truths. No one wrote about what Clarke did and yet, it makes sense that she would kill to save her people. It makes sense that there is blood on her hands that she is working hard to wash off. It makes sense that she wants to give back what she’s taken.

“Yes. But I chose my people. At the end of the day, we always choose our people. So no, Bellamy, I am not psychic. I do see things but they amount to nothing. It always matters what we choose to do.”

Clarke stands up in what now seems like a small cabin, and her fingers tangle in his curls when she brings his head to rest on her stomach. She’s small enough that it feels like Bellamy could break her in half but there has always been something about her that screamed – _try it and burn_.

So he doesn’t. He stays there, his skin pressed to her shirt, breathing her in as she cards her fingers through his hair. Of all the things they have done for each other they’ve never even kissed and Bellamy understands it now.

He understands it now because home doesn’t have to be four walls and meal on the table. For someone like Bellamy, who has never had a home, the Delphi and Clarke strangely seem like one.

“If you want to leave, you can leave. And if you want to come back with your people, I will be waiting.”

She doesn’t kiss him until the morning light filters into the room and finds them curled into each other on the floor. She talks and he listens, tells him about being seventeen and murdering more people than she could have ever imagined. Bellamy talks and she listens, tells her about being ten and alone because that was better than anyone finding out he has a sister and floating his mother.

“In the end, I couldn’t stop it.”

She runs a finger down the crease in his chin, smiles up at him. There’s no war paint now and he knows that magic isn’t just a rumor. There’s something bewitching in the way she looks at him like this, guard down, defiant and soft at the same time, peering into his eyes like she knows more than he could ever tell her.

“You loved your family. What else was there to do?”

“You know more than you let on, Clarke. So if you can see why I did what I did, why can’t you see that you didn’t have a choice, either?”

When she kisses him it’s not a victory march. It’s not war drums or any of the violence he has gotten to know in the last twenty three years.

It’s just quiet and loud at the same time, it’s _calm_. His armies left in shambles and his heart splitting in half because there is so much he hopes for and so much he’s got to live for.

When Clarke kisses him, it makes Bellamy wish that someone could ring the village bell so the world knows what it feels like to be guilty and undeserving and still want so much more than you can get.

But all that shatters is something inside of him, that one word he can’t pronounce, and he leaves with the dawn, Clarke snoring lightly, leaves because at least now - he’s got a home to return to.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> That's it! I hope you guys liked it and if you did, please let me know - kudos & comments are my lifeblood! Also, if you didn't like it tell me why, I appreciate constructive criticism. 
> 
> Also - how about that trailer, huh? The hand nuzzle was e v e r y t h i n g! 
> 
> p. s. come talk to me on [tumblr](http://marauders-groupie.tumblr.com)!
> 
> p. p. s. if you haven't already, please check out [Loud and Alive](http://loudandaliveblog.com)! It's a site that Bethany (bowlingfornerds) and I founded, and we're super into intersectional feminism and fandom. Also, we accept submissions!


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